The early reviews of the Barack Obama Presidential Center are in, and they’re deservedly brutal. The ex-president’s monument, opening on Chicago’s Southside this Juneteenth, has been compared to the Death Star, a Klingon prison, a self-cleaning cat litter box, or, as implied by President Trump in a Truth Social post, a giant garbage can.

Yet, what it resembles most, I’d argue, is a mausoleum, the Obamausoleum, if you will. The tower is clad in New Hampshire granite, rises in a faceted, asymmetrical mass with almost no windows, and looms over a grassy public park. It even has words carved near the top, giving the whole thing the unmistakable air of the world’s largest headstone. But what it marks — unintentionally — is the final resting place of Obamaism: a politics after politics, a monument to the fantasy that if enough institutions speak pleasant bromides in a reassuring voice, if politicians act like noble characters from The West Wing, some ineffable thing called “the arc of the moral universe” will bend and everyone wins. Who needs culture war when you can have culture peace?

That’s not what was originally sold to voters. When Obama was elected in 2008 — almost 20 years ago — he promised a sharp political pivot from the neoliberal consensus of both the Bushes and the Clintons — “change you can believe in.” But then he spent much of his presidency convincing everyone that massive structural change was impossible in the face of Republican opposition. What he offered instead was the thin gruel of himself: Obama as symbol, Obama as cultural ascendance, Obama as proof that America had already become better simply by recognizing him. Now the Obama Center represents a near-billion-dollar effort to convince visitors that the symbolism of the first Black president was not a consolation prize but the victory all along.

The contrast with Trump’s proposed library is instructive, if only because Trump’s version appears more honest. The renderings depict an American palace, essentially: a 50-story glass tower in Miami, with a recreated Oval Office in its current gilded decor, a golden escalator nodding to his 2015 announcement, and a gold statue of Trump himself, fist raised in the Butler, Pennsylvania pose, visible from the ocean. Trump — in other words — wants power to look like power in the classical and profane sense: a golden statue, a skyscraper, a plane in the lobby, a throne room with paid parking. 

The Obama Center performs the more sophisticated trick of making his power look like its own critique: socially conscious, locally engaged, and solemnly democratic. It is power laundered through the institutions Democrats still control: museums, foundations, public art, nonprofits, celebrity culture, while offering vague nods to activism. It conceals itself in the soft narcotic of inclusive language, forever speaking in the first-person plural, which you can’t miss in the center’s 88-foot-tall “Power of Words” installation.

To be fair, the center itself isn’t a total travesty. Many of the individual pieces of the 19.3-acre site sound perfectly pleasant (on paper, at least, as the Obama Foundation denied my media credentials for the opening three times). It is populated with 30 site-specific art commissions from artists such as Maya Lin, Nick Cave, and Julie Mehretu. There is also a working branch of the Chicago Public Library; a basketball facility called Home Court whose NBA-caliber court is stenciled with Obama slogans; and a garden pavilion that, in a move seemingly designed to give conservatives a conniption, is named after Nancy Pelosi. The outdoor spaces, particularly, hint at one of liberalism’s more defensible instincts: build something useful, make it pretty enough, and hope people will come. What you will not find on the campus is the presidential archive itself, making this the first “presidential library” since FDR’s that isn’t one — his records live either in a federal warehouse in the suburbs or online somewhere, managed by the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit accountable primarily to itself.

Instead, the center is self-consciously billed as a new kind of presidential library: it’s a campus, a civic resource, a home for hope and change. There are classes planned, programs galore — gatherings, forums, activation, oh my! The Obama Foundation would desperately like you to stop trusting your lying eyes and stop thinking of the whole thing as merely a monument to one man. They say it’s about you, dear American. They say the tower somehow represents four hands coming together as a sign of unity, and point to the building’s stony crown, which contains a self-effacing line cast in five-foot-high concrete letters: “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word we.”  

Yet it is hard to imagine the 225-foot windowless tower rising over Chicago’s Jackson Park as anything but a cold and misshapen monument to Obama’s ego. Consider the fact that architect Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s original proposal was a more horizontal affair: a low-lying campus of museum, forum, and library buildings spread across the lakefront park, restrained in the way their firm’s work usually is. (One architecture critic called their work “confident buildings, but not boastful ones. They have a way of insinuating themselves into the landscape, behaving as if they’ve always been there.”)

“The tower wants to be humble, but not so humble that anyone might miss it from the highway.”

Obama sent them back, saying he wanted something “iconic.” The Obamausoleum is the result of the ex-president becoming the shadow architect, the built expression of a client who had once seriously considered becoming an architect before settling for the presidency instead. “He made many good suggestions, and he made a few not so good suggestions,” Tsien told the Chicago Tribune. This is a fascinating revelation, because it captures the barely concealed vanity of the whole enterprise.

Everything at the center ultimately bends back toward the former president, from the exhibits narrating Obama’s rise from subject of earnest hand-drawn campaign posters to gray-haired statesman, culminating in a full-scale replica of his Oval Office circa 2014, where visitors are invited to sit at the desk and take a photograph. The references to the Civil Rights Movement, community organizing, the future, and the children: all of it is arranged around the central fact of Obama’s historical importance. The tower wants to be humble, but not so humble that anyone might miss it from the highway.

Since 2016, Obama has seemed to barely even pay lip service to politics. Consider the soft-focus cultural project that has defined his post-presidency. “There is nothing more pathetic in life than a former president,” John Quincy Adams once supposedly said, which is easy to say when you then spend almost 20 years in Congress making yourself useful. William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the United States. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. Jimmy Carter turned his post-presidency into a rebuke of his presidency, including numerous attempts to safeguard foreign elections. Obama has settled for something like curator-in-chief of his post-presidential decades. The Netflix deals, the Bruce Springsteen podcast, the memoirs, the music playlists, the book lists, are premised on the idea that America’s problems are fundamentally narrative rather than structural, that the right stories, the right voices, the right cultural institutions can do the work that policy apparently couldn’t.

But now in 2026, the thinness of that philosophy is hard to ignore. The end of the end of history is here, and we’ve seen politics roar back, even with a Democratic president in the form of Joe Biden’s big post-COVID restructuring of the economy. Now that Trump is restored, Obamacare is fraying, the courts have been remade, and the Democratic Party has been reduced to relying on the courts to save its legislative wins of the past from the rubble; there is little left of Obama’s legacy to grasp onto other than 2010s nostalgia. 

What’s ironic is that a decade ago, George Lucas tried to build a Museum of Narrative Art on the lakefront, a billion-dollar tribute to nostalgia for the man who gave the world Jedi, droids, and enough licensed plastic to choke a Wookiee. The project collapsed after legal fights over public land, and Lucas eventually took his collection to Los Angeles. Chicago rejected the creator of Star Wars on the grounds that public space should not be surrendered to one man’s mythmaking, only to accept a more subtle form of fiction in Jackson Park that the public can buy tickets to for $30 a pop.

The good news? Cemeteries can be a pleasant place to relax.